Morning of My Life is presented as one forty-two-minute track, but it behaves less like a song stretched beyond reason than a whole day compressed into one unstable morning. Nicolai Dunger conceived it with Jari Haapalainen as six movements, then allowed Johan Berthling’s arrangements and a large ensemble to turn a private memory into something closer to a film without images. The recurring subject is simple: youth, waking beneath golden light, birds calling in the night, soil and warm breath. Yet memory refuses to remain simple once music begins touching it. Every return enlarges the scene until tenderness, confusion, grief and exhilaration are occupying the same meadow.
This was the third and final A Taste of Ra album, ending a trilogy through which Dunger had separated his most exploratory instincts from the more recognizable singer-songwriter work released under his own name. The first two records approached voice, instruments and recording as private experiments. Here he opens that private chamber to sixteen musicians. The result is not less personal. It is personal feeling multiplied until individual memory becomes communal weather. Horns, strings, piano, percussion and acoustic instruments do not merely accompany Dunger’s voice. They react to it, interrupt it and sometimes appear to carry emotions he can no longer contain alone.
The opening is almost alarmingly exposed. Piercing horn tones spread across the landscape before acoustic guitar establishes a dry recurring pattern. Accordion, violin, piano and loosely rolling drums gather gradually, creating warmth without domestic neatness. When Dunger begins singing, his voice sounds both physically close and emotionally far away, as though the adult singer is trying to reach the younger self preserved inside the scene. His delivery naturally invites comparisons with Tim Buckley and Van Morrison, but imitation is the least interesting part of the connection. What matters is his willingness to let the voice crack, swell and become excessive when ordinary phrasing would make the memory too manageable.
That first long movement contains much of the album’s beauty. The ensemble repeatedly approaches something resembling folk song, then lets free jazz and orchestral color pull the edges apart. This does not feel like experimentation added to prove sophistication. Memory itself is causing the instability. The guitar pattern attempts to hold the morning still while everything surrounding it continues changing. A horn enters too sharply, strings deepen the emotional temperature, percussion knocks the image sideways, and Dunger repeats the central lines as though another performance might finally recover the original sensation intact.
The album’s central string passage provides the clearest evidence that repetition has failed to restore the past. After the crowded warmth, the music opens into several minutes of exposed, aching strings. The absence of Dunger’s voice becomes almost physical. What had seemed like celebration now reveals its foundation in loss. Morning is not only the beginning of life; it is a beginning remembered from much later, when the people, places and version of the self belonging to it may no longer exist. The strings do not illustrate sadness politely. They suspend the listener inside it until the recollection becomes larger than the person recollecting.
Morning of My Life becomes rougher and less coherent in its second half, but that disorder belongs to the work’s emotional movement. Bass, percussion, electronic crackle and more forceful ensemble playing replace the pastoral openness with something resembling panic or jungle-funk assembled from broken parts. The film has moved beyond its beautiful establishing shots. Dunger’s memory is no longer an object he can admire from a safe distance; it has become a creature moving through the room. The recurring melody survives, but it returns damaged, surrounded by sounds that refuse to support nostalgia’s wish for a clean conclusion.
Some listeners may find this later section frustrating because the record stops rewarding them in the same way. The graceful themes become harder to locate, and the ensemble’s abundance can turn into congestion. Yet smoothing that passage would falsify the experience. A forty-two-minute memory piece that remained uniformly beautiful would resemble interior decoration. Dunger allows beauty to become exhausting, contradictory and occasionally embarrassing. His voice pushes too far because the feeling has pushed too far. The music loses direction because recollection has reached the area where direction was never preserved.
The enormous personnel list explains part of the record’s volatility. Dunger and Haapalainen are joined by Johan Berthling, Thomas Tjärnkvist, Santiago Jimenez, Bengt Berger, Mats Öberg, Daniel Bingert, Jean-Louis Huhta, Per “Texas” Johansson, Jonas Kullhammar, Johan Arrias, Andreas Berthling, Anna Rodell, Emma Lindhamre and Lars Warnstad. This is not a conventional backing band arranged around a central star. It is a temporary society of Swedish jazz, improvisation, folk and experimental musicians, each capable of changing the emotional meaning of the piece by entering for a few seconds. The recording feels crowded because the memory has invited everyone it knows.
Häpna issued the album as H.36, a single-track CD whose form asks the listener to surrender the usual ability to select highlights. There are six movements internally, but no separate track markers turning them into convenient destinations. One must enter the morning at its beginning and remain through its changes, including the moments when warmth gives way to disorientation. That design matters. The record is not a playlist of moods. It is one emotional event whose difficult passages alter the beauty heard earlier.
The title initially sounds optimistic, almost innocent, but by the end “the morning of my life” has acquired several meanings. It is youth, awakening, a remembered campsite, the first light of artistic identity and the painful recognition that beginnings can only be revisited through transformation. Dunger cannot return to that morning, so he builds another one from voices, strings, horns, drums and recording tape. The reconstruction is imperfect, unruly and alive. Its imperfections are what keep it from becoming a postcard.
Morning of My Life closes the A Taste of Ra trilogy not by resolving its experiments but by allowing them to overwhelm the song that began the process. Private folk music becomes free jazz, chamber music, fractured rock and something almost theatrical without settling permanently into any of them. The record’s deepest achievement is making memory audible as an active force rather than a preserved image. It bends time, recruits strangers, repeats itself, contradicts itself and occasionally destroys the very beauty it hoped to recover. Then, somewhere inside the wreckage, the original morning glows again.
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